Introduction

In the early 1960s, two films notably explored the fears of western Cold War audiences about the threat of Communism and nuclear war. The Manchurian Candidate, a film released in 1962, became widely heralded in later years for having been far ahead of its time and critically applauded as a dark comedy, mixing melodrama and satire. One of the most successful films on the contemporary fears of nuclear warfare was Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, or simply Dr Strangelove, released in 1964.[1]

While two other films released in 1964, Fail Safe and Seven days in May, also dealt with the cold war and the threat of nuclear holocaust, neither of these films arguably matched the mix of social satire, parody, and the deadly serious topic of war in the nuclear age provided by Dr Strangelove.[2]

Both of these films are very ‘Kennedy era’ films. The Manchurian Candidate starred and was produced by Frank Sinatra, a close friend of the President. Dr Strangelove, whose theme of nuclear war echoed the Cuban Missile Crisis, was scheduled for release on December 12, 1963, but was not shown until January 1964 due to President John F. Kennedy's assassination in November 1963.[3]

These films sought to parody contemporary political and societal events of the early 1960s, including sexual fears and tension, the Cuban Missile Crisis and an ironic foreshadowing of a presidential assassination.For these reasons, both the Manchurian Candidate and Dr Strangelove effectively marked the parameters within which Hollywood explored those topics in the 1960s.[4]

Here, we will examine to what extent Cold War satire, in these two films, of the early 1960s trivialized Cold War fears of the period, primarily in the United States.

Both of these films, due to their significance to cinema and their social commentary on contemporary Cold War events have been the subject of study and critical analysis by both film critics and historians. The historiography of the Cold War has produced much debate among historians, political scientists, and journalists, interpreting the course and origins of the conflict in particular. The Cold War has now been generally accepted to have begun in the closing months of the Second World War in 1945, and to have ended officially with the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Communism during the Cold War, especially Russians and specifically the ‘Soviets’, were especially vilified in western film and media. Prior to the Second World War, ‘the Russian’ was depicted periodically in film as devious and untrustworthy. Briefly during the Second World War, after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the film industry put its anti-Russian attitudes aside and produced a significant number of films that took an opposite tack.

This negative Russian image gave way to a much more idealistic and attractive one, as Hollywood film-makers adapted themselves to new methods of expression.[5] During the Cold War years, however, the American film industry once again took its lead from the emerging politics of the day.[6]

On the 5th of March 1946, then former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave a speech in Missouri, just months after the end of the Second World War, where he charged the Soviet Union, still formally if only nominally allied with the United Kingdom and the United States, with being responsible for 'a shadow' falling upon 'the scenes so lately blighted by Allied victory'.[7] This speech is best remembered for his reference to the allegorical 'iron curtain' across Europe.

Less well remembered, but symptomatic of the paranoia about the threat of internal subversion that seized the United States during the Cold War years, were Churchill's comments about 'communist parties' and 'fifth columns' which, he stated, 'constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization'.[8] This fear of fifth columns would be a central theme of TheManchurian Candidate. Response to Churchill's speech may have been mixed, but public opinion in the United States about Russia changed drastically as the culture and ideology, including motion pictures, of anti-communism pervaded American life in the 1950s.[9]

The election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 was to prove, in retrospect, significant to the intense trajectory of the Cold War. Following the Korean War, the ‘conflict’ of the superpowers of the Cold War entered a comfortable routine under the conservative Eisenhower administration. Kennedy, however, had campaigned against American complacency, and even weakness to the Soviet threat.[10] During his administration, in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War neared the brink of the nuclear war.

Film Poster for 'The Manchurian Candidate' (1962) | Source

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Based on the novel by Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate starred Frank Sinatra, who was also a co-producer, and Laurence Harvey. The movie begins at the time of the Korean War, when Major Ben Marco, played by Sinatra, and members of his platoon are captured by the enemy and made prisoners of war in Korea where they are brainwashed by their communist interrogators.

After returning home, Marco is plagued by nightmares that eventually suggest that a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Raymond Shaw (played by Harvey), has been brainwashed to kill fellow platoon members and eventually to assassinate the President of the United States.[11] Because of the depiction of a presidential assassination in the film, Sinatra as co-producer had to seek permission from President Kennedy to proceed with the script.

While Sinatra had a personal friendship and connection to Kennedy, the subject remained controversial and was condemned by many in Hollywood as inflammatory.[12] Sinatra as a member of the Kennedy entourage played Major Marco as a ravaged lonely hero who, much like Kennedy, tries to rouse a credulous army bureaucracy to the danger posed by Shaw. When Shaw, ordered by his mother to assassinate the presidential candidate, trains his sights on him, the candidate is ironically asking Americans to sacrifice for their country.

Like President Kennedy, The Manchurian Candidate warns against right-wing hysteria as well as against bureaucratic complacency. Both the film and the administration aimed to breathe new life into the Cold War.[13] But far from mocking the mentality it displays, it aims to reawaken a lethargic nation to the Communist menace. Capitalizing on its improbabilities by mixing realism with science fiction, The Manchurian Candidate is, argues Michael Rogin, the most sophisticated film of the Cold War.[14]

The Manchurian Candidate, addressing the fears of the communist fifth column, extends to its absolute limits American fears and conceptions of mind control. The film suggests that brainwashing might involve the total control of human consciousness and perception, allowing a person's actions to be directed completely by external suggestion.

The brainwashed men of Marco’s platoon not only follow commands but also view reality allegorically, seeing a harmless American setting rather than the far more sinister truth during the brainwashing scene at the opening of the film. As Timothy Melley suggests, their utterly falsified consciousness seems to confirm FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's assertion that many high ranking communist agents were "attractive," "smartly-dressed," apparently patriotic American women.[15]

For all its concern about a communist conspiracy to seize control of the American political system, The Manchurian Candidate is equally worried about the influence that women exert over men in the domestic sphere.[16] In fact, the film is deeply conflicted in its stance on Communism. It takes seriously the worst fears of American anti-communists, like Senator McCarthy, who claimed that a communist strategy had placed "concealed members in sensitive positions in government", while simultaneously, the film is a scathing satire of anti-communism.

It also depicts anti-communists as both witting and unwitting communist agents themselves. The film mocks McCarthy through the fictional figure of Senator Iselin, Shaw’s frequently drunken step-father, who in a mirroring of McCarthy’s infamous denouncing of the Hollywood ‘Red Faction’, cannot consistently remember the number of Defence Department officials he has accused of being communists. His exasperated wife, played by Angela Lansbury, finally allows him to settle on ‘exactly 57 card-carrying communists’ because he is fond of 'Heinz 57 Tomato Sauce'.

In addressing the Cold War fears of ‘brainwashing’, the film is notable for the way it employs a model of malevolent, external control to raise questions about much more ordinary and pervasive forms of social influence. Brainwashing was a real fear, and a topic of concern for average citizens concerned over the influence of everything from television[17] to the fluoridation of water. In this manner, both films, successfully connected the very real fears as well as employed tones of rationality familiar to the audience into creating the absurd and the parody of these subjects.[18]The Manchurian Candidate's deepest worry is neither Communism nor anti-communism, but embattled human autonomy, specifically male autonomy.

To the extent that the film is about Communism, it is about how both communist and anti-communist propaganda might overpower the minds of Americans, and it suggests that responsibility for such hostile takeovers is the fault of insufficiently masculine men and inappropriately masculine women.[19] Raymond’s mother Mrs. Iselin eventually reveals that she is not working for the communists so much as for her own gains. The film's other women, two assertive blondes named Rosie and Josie, also both possess power over their male love interests, Marco and Shaw respectively.

When Rosie meets Marco, the film evokes the brainwashing scenes at the start of the film by her lighting Marco's cigarette and Marco hypnotically repeating her phone number. Shortly after Marco gets to New York he is arrested and inexplicably calls Rosie, whom he has met only once, who comes immediately to bail him out; as they drive away, he again hypnotically repeats her phone number.

The film's deepest worry, then, is not that communists are brainwashing young Americans; it is rather the equally ludicrous notion that American society has allowed women, and especially mothers, far too much influence over men. As Michael Rogin and Timothy Melley suggest, Mrs. Iselin is the epitome of the domineering mother from the writer Philip Wylie's popular "momism" theory, namely, the notion that overbearing and overprotective mothers emasculated their sons and thereby the nation.[20]

The Manchurian Candidate reflects a shocked recognition that something like Pavlovian conditioning happens to everyone simply because mothers greatly influence the construction of their children's subjectivity.[21] Domestic ideology promised that the American family would triumph over Communism. The Manchurian Candidate, by subordinating Communism to maternal influence, showed what that promise entailed; the family defeats Communism only by first generating Communism and then self-destructively replacing it. Freed from its roots in “momism”, communism and anti-communism would have to be seen as having lives of their own.[22]

Closing thoughts on The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

The film successfully satirized both the political right and left and provoked ideologues on both sides to anger in their reviews in 1962.[23] The very next year Lee Harvey Oswald, like Shaw, carried a rifle with telescopic sights up several flights of stairs in a building and fired through a window on a target below, but unlike Shaw, he did not shift his aim. No doubt the Presidential assassination which imitated art was too an eerie coincidence.

The film was abruptly pulled out of public exhibition immediately after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The film’s similarities to real life events became too real, and in this case, did little to trivialize actual fears of communist conspiracies. Due to its uncanny resemblance to real life events, as well as its controversial dark comedy and critique of American society, the major American television broadcasting networks passed on telecasting it until the 1980s.[24]

While the film may have at once roused Americans to the dangers of Communism, it also parodied and successfully trivialized the dreaded communist fifth column, mocking sensationalist Communist ‘witch-hunters’ such as Senator Joe McCarthy. It further subverted fears about mind control and brainwashing onto the topical and sensational issue of sexuality, shifting masculinity in the Cold War era, and female emancipation and domination: women getting out of hand are a greater concern than a Communist fifth-column.

Dr Strangelove (1964)

Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, which derived anti-Communism and nuclear holocaust from the satire of free man's fear of female sexuality. Dr. Strangelove derives dark humour from the sexual politics of cold war cinema, placing thermonuclear war into absurdity. Stanley Kubrick thoroughly researched his subject, according to one film review having read over 70 books on the subject, but used the novel Two Hours to Doom, written by former RAF officer Peter George, as the primary material of the film.[25]

The book covered the subject of nuclear warfare in a very serious tone, but as Kubrick built his scenes, they became comedy.[26] He addressed the very nature of his satirical film in an article he wrote in 1963, discussing his writing of the screenplay: ‘one had to keep leaving things out of it which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny, and these things were very real.’[27] David Seed has suggested that by placing the topic of thermonuclear warfare into the absurd, this was in fact a coping mechanism and comic strategy enabling its exploration further in satire.[28]

Film Poster for 'Dr Strangelove' (1964) | Source

The film begins with the clearly deranged General Jack D. Ripper. Raving about the need to protect his bodily fluids, or “essence”, from women by withholding his seed, he sends flights of nuclear armed bombers towards Russia. He uses the initials of "purity of essence" as the code which locks the bombers on their targets. General Buck Turgidson, played by George C. Scott, adopts the language of the contemporary Cold War strategists in projecting nuclear casualties of the unfolding debacle. Peter Sellers plays three roles: American President Merkin Muffley, RAF officer Group Captain Mandrake, and the mysterious Dr. Strangelove. Major Kong is played by Slim Pickens, who as the bomber pilot, rides the bomb between his legs waving his Stetson hat down to detonation in Russia. The bomb will in turn set off a Russian “doomsday machine” that will wipe out not just “momism” and Communism, as Rogin suggests, but the entire world.[29]

What shocked some of the better informed movie audiences were the factual sources on which some of the darkest and ostensibly humorous portions of the film are based. Fluoridation of water, parodied in Dr Strangelove, in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s was the subject of great debate and even controversy. In the climate of the Cold War, the idea that the American Medical Association might be part of a subversive Communist plot to ‘deliver us all into the hands of the Russians’, seemed very real to some.[30] The so called ‘Doomsday Machine’ discussed by Dr. Strangelove was the subject of strategic theory from a study developed and paid for by the American research organization the RAND Corporation.[31] Herman Kahn published his findings in a book On Thermonuclear War, his title perhaps echoing that of Carl Von Clausewitz’s classic On War.

Ripper tells Mandrake that he discovered the Communist plot to pollute all Americans' "precious bodily fluids" during "the physical act of love." | Source

This is the technological theme of the Cold War narrative which can be characterized by “the game theory”, discussed extensively by Steven Belletto. The game theory narrative popularized the idea that the rationality of pure mathematics could be applied to manage major threats of the Cold War, the menace of an unknown enemy, and the spectre of an accidental nuclear exchange. It demonstrates that Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove is a satire not only of nuclear brinksmanship, but also of the particular game-theoretic rationality that was claimed to prevent such escalation from actually coming to war.[32]

Lines from the character General Buck Turgidson in the film directly mimic passages from On Thermonuclear War. Turgidson's statement, ‘two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless, distinguishable post-war environments’, reflects a chart from Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War titled, "Table 3: Tragic but Distinguishable Post-war States", listing projected deaths in millions of people and time needed for economic recovery. It ends ominously with the question: ‘Will the survivors envy the dead?’ [33] This question is echoed by Peter Sellers as President Muffley in his discussion with Dr. Strangelove regarding the future prospects of nuclear war survivors living in underground shelters, “But wouldn't the survivors be so grief-stricken and anguished that they'd envy the dead and not want to go on living?” Kahn proposes they would not:

‘Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, objective studies indicate that even though the amount of human tragedy would be greatly increased in the post-war world, the increase would not preclude normal and happy lives for the majority of survivors and their descendants.’

— Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 20.

While satirized in Dr. Strangelove, Kahn’s work astonished and shocked many when the RAND Corp’s studies were presented beyond scientific and strategic thinkers to the public. Even though Kahn's professed goal, was to increase the prospects for peace by outlining the practical aftermath of nuclear war, and not ‘the moral aspects of military problems,’[34] many people were shocked and offended by the direct manner in which he incorporated human life and death into his strategic analyses.[35] Steven Belletto illustrated this point by citing journalist James R. Newman in his 1961 Scientific American review where he asked: "Is there really a Herman Kahn? It is hard to believe . . . . No one could write like this, no one could think like this. Perhaps the whole thing is a staff hoax in bad taste."[36]

Historians have debated on whom Dr. Strangelove is in fact modelled after. Did Kubrick, primarily choose Herman Kahn as the basis for the character?[37] According to David Seed, Dr.. Strangelove, with his dark physical comedy, is most likely a composite figure signifying the Nazi and American military continuation as well as the scientific rationalism proposed by Kahn and the RAND Corp.[38]

The “doomsday machine”, while seemingly unrealistic but in fact based on a rhetorical discussion in Kahn’s book, served as the analogy to mutually assured destruction.[39] Audiences would have understood this theme, the near total destruction of the United States and Soviet Union in a real nuclear war; then almost everything that happens in the movie could have actually happened. The most important theme of the film is that it makes fun of the sad, perverse, and absurd reality that the United States and the Soviet Union could destroy each other within thirty minutes, both simultaneously improbable but possible.[40]

Kubrick deliberately chose to use the aircraft delivered nuclear ordinance in favour of the available inter-continental ballistic missile in order to provide a scenario in the film that would provide actors to interact with a protracted timeline and tension.[41] Automation at the hands of the doomsday machine ensures retaliation by taking humans out of the loop. Ruling out "human meddling" is crucial because one must make credible the incredible threat of suicide. Because deterrence requires the creation of fear, as advocated and discussed by Kahn, deterrence is arguably more an art than a science: the enemy must fear that the costs of attack will outweigh the benefit.[42] This is explained in the film through the following dialogue:

President Merkin Muffley: "But, how is it possible for this thing to be triggered automatically, and at the same time impossible to un-trigger?"

Dr Strangelove: “Mr. President, it is not only possible, it is essential. That is the whole idea of this machine, you know. Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision making process which rules out human meddling, the doomsday machine is terrifying. It's simple to understand. And completely credible, and convincing.” [43]

Dr Strangelove - played by Peter Sellers. Sellers would also play in the role of President Merkin Muffley, and as Group Captain Mandrake | Source

Artificial images of heroism and glory can be usefully contrasted with blatantly satirical perspectives on war, where Kubrick lampoons the fallibility of political and military leaders, as well as the culture that links war and masculinity.[44]

Additionally, a satirical narrative is evoked by the rogue General Jack D. Ripper when he inquires of Group Captain Mandrake:

Ripper: Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?

Mandrake: No, I don’t think I do Sir, no.

Ripper: He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, fifty years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought.[45]

The character of Group Captain Mandrake here provides a unique insight into Cold War alliances of the period, notably that of the United Kingdom and the United States. Mandrake is portrayed as both very sane and clearheaded character, yet completely impotent in the face of the events around him and in dealing with the likes of Ripper.

Steven Morrison has suggested that the initial portrayal of Mandrake’s character in standing up to the lunacy of Ripper might be viewed as a protest against American foreign policy, it devolves quickly into the British dilemma of the Cold War, namely that of Britain caught in the middle of actions played out between the United States and the Soviet Union.[46] General Ripper likewise represents the military establishment, and in this case, the field commanders of the nuclear age.

Kubrick suggests a military neurosis where the military, the protector, becomes the instrument of the nation’s own destruction or self-destruction because of the irreversible chain of events set in place by the doomsday device.[47] Intriguingly, in the foreword to Kahn’s book, Klaus Knorr cited that the study of military problems and strategy in the nuclear age had to be the subject of interdisciplinary study:

‘In the analysis of military problems since the war, the contribution of civilians has been unprecedently large in volume and high in quality... The problems of defense have become inordinately complex, and their solution is not susceptible to the rules of thumb, often called principles, which the military derived from past experience. For stating and solving these problems, all the analytical techniques are required which the disciplines of social science, history, and mathematics have evolved…we must employ them if we do not want to base judgement and policy to an excessive degree on vague reasoning and sheer guesswork.’[48]

Quick closing thoughts on Dr Strangelove (1964)

The parody and dark humour of Dr. Strangelove is perhaps unmistakable and has survived to ensure its place in film heritage. The lingering reality and fears of nuclear wars, however, remain real for the audience. The closing montage of atomic detonations with Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again”, only serves to highlight the point: there will be no “again” in the aftermath of nuclear war.

Bomber commander Major T. J. Kong riding the bomb in one of the most iconic scenes of the film. | Source

Conclusion

Satire was most notably used in these Cold War films to transfer contemporary fears, either onto another social concern or into the realm of parody and satire. In the case of The Manchurian Candidate, the very real fears of an internal Communist “fifth column” and “brainwashing” were transposed to contemporary gender issues regarding feminism, while fully satirizing the political climate of the left and right wing political parties. While Dr. Strangelove may have been a-political, sexual humour served as obscuration for some of the darkest fears of nuclear warfare, something the world had only recently experienced with the Cuban missile crisis. There were, however, lines these films were not prepared to cross in its imitation of reality, namely depictions of the assassination of the American President.

For The Manchurian Candidate, the topic already released resulted in the film, result was self-censure while Dr. Strangelove saw Stanley Kubrick remove a scene depicting the President “struck down in his prime” in a pie fight.[49] Ultimately the success of these films satirical comment, and perhaps the reason for their long term success, was their ability to confront contemporary issues of fear in their society in a manner which had not before been realised.

Sources and notes

1) Stanley Kubrick’s screenplay of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), was based on the book by Peter Bryant (a pseudonym for Peter George), Red Alert (New York: Ace Books, 1958).

3) Jonathan Kirshner, “Subverting the Cold War in the 1960s: Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate, and The Planet of the Apes”, Film and History, Vol. 31, No.2, (2001): 41.

4) Monaco, The Sixties, 173.

5) Daniel J. Leab, “How Red Was My Valley: Hollywood, the Cold War Film, and I Married a Communist”, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 19, No. 1, Historians and Movies: The State of the Art: Part 2 (January 1984): 60.

10) Jonathan Kirshner in “Subverting the Cold War in the 1960s: Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate, and The Planet of the Apes”, Film and History, Vol. 31, No.2, (2001): 40, and Michael Rogin in “Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies”, Representations, No. 6 (Spring 1984): 17, are two historians who have cited the Kennedy era precisely as period which sought to rouse Americans from a perceived complacency.

11) Monaco, The Sixties,170.

12) Ibid,170.

13) Rogin, “Kiss Me Deadly”: 17.

14) Ibid:16.

15) Timothy Melley, “Brainwashed! Conspiracy Theory and Ideology in the Post-war United States”, New German Critique, No. 103, Dark Powers: Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in History and Literature (Winter, 2008):155.

16) Ibid: 157

17) Alan Nadel “Cold War Television and the Technology of Brainwashing” in American Cold War Culture, ed. Douglas Field (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005) 148.

27) Stanley Kubrick’s article is cited from David Seed, American Science Fiction in the Cold War, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999) 148.

28) Seed, American Science Fiction, 145.

29) Rogin, “Kiss Me Deadly”: 18.

30) William A. Gamson discussed this debate in his public opinion surveys conducted in Cambridge Massachusetts near Harvard University in his article “The Fluoridation Dialogue: Is It an Ideological Conflict?”, The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Winter, 1961): 526.

37) Steven Belletto in “The Game Theory Narrative and the Myth of the National Security State”, American Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 2 (June 2009): 344 and Dan Lindley in “What I Learned since I Stopped Worrying and Studied the Movie: A Teaching Guide to Stanley Kubrick's ‘Dr.. Strangelove’”, Political Science and Politics, Vol. 34, No. 3 (September 2001): 667, each provide their case justifying the extent to which Herman Kahn is the basis for the character. Lindley suggests a partial composite of Herman Kahn and Henry Kissinger among others.

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